Cannes 2014: Mr Turner review – Timothy Spall dazzles as artist JMW Turner | Film | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic. Mike Leigh has made a period biographical drama before: Topsy-Turvy (1999), about the rewarding but tense association of Gilbert and Sullivan and their own rewarding but tense association with the theatre-going public. Now he made another utterly confident excursion into the past and into the occult arcana of Englishness and Victoriana: a study of the final years of the painter JMW Turner, played with relish and sympathy by Timothy Spall. In the past, I and others have commented that Leigh's dialogue in his contemporary movies has an exaggerated, vaudevillian, neo-Dickensian quality. Now he has actually made a Dickensian movie – accompanied, perhaps, by a shrewdly distanced critical sensibility with something of Peter Ackroyd.

There are wives and daughters and fallen women and poignantly ailing fathers and sea journeys and huge marshy landscapes, although it is sexually explicit in a way foreign to Dickens. (His Turner is a regular visitor to Margate, not too far from Broadstairs, where Dickens was to be found, but there is no record of a meeting, and none invented fictionally here. He comments, sourly, that Thackeray has taken a dislike to one of his canvases.) The painter is a harrumphing eccentric, with a handsome establishment in London, who enjoys the freedom that wealth and success has gained him, a freedom to roam and a freedom to speak his mind to simpering critics and saucer-eyed buyers. He is utterly confident, exchanging banter with lesser, prissier contemporaries at the Royal Academy, tolerant of an envious failure who begs him for a loan. Turner has the mutton chops and bulging eyes of a Toby jug, or perhaps like the pig's head that we see him eating – accepting another slice of cheek, his own being full and wobbly.

He grunts and growls with occasional Chewbacca whinnies; he huffs like a mill owner, or like one of those steam engines of the Victorian age whose encroaching modernity makes Turner so uncomfortable. Occasionally, he will spit at the canvas, and mix it up with the paint because his gluey sputum has exactly the consistency he needs: a mannerism that shows off perfectly his forthright, uninhibited, primitive approach – almost a kind of English art brut. But his unconventionally visionary, cloudy canvases are making him a marginal figure in the artistic establishment and a figure of fun for the general public. Turner is shown to be desperately lonely, needing the company and touch of women – but culpably irresponsible in failing to acknowledge his past liaisons and children. Ruth Sheen plays his ex-lover Sarah Danby, who upbraids him over his indifference to his daughters. Turner prefers to live the life of a bohemian bachelor, sexually exploiting his housekeeper, Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson) and then becoming obsessed with his Margate seaside landlady Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey) for whom he conceives a great, uxorious love.

There is a brilliant scene in which Turner engages a prostitute, inspects her semi-nudity and then proceeds to sketch her, bursting into unexplained tears when she artlessly reveals how young she is. Does he just want her for artistic purposes? Is the business of sketching a voyeuristic refinement of sexual pleasure – or is something even more strange going on? As the artist's health declines, Spall's great bearlike Turner becomes a big, vulnerable toddler, and it is unbearably sad. Paul Jesson gives a lovely performance as Turner's beloved elderly widowed father, who is content to live with him as his manservant and factotum, and has relapsed into what Turner shrewdly identifies as the false persona of a "dunce" – despite the fact that he taught Turner to read and write. Joshua McGuire is excellent as the supercilious Ruskin, whose affectations Turner cannot help but mock, and whose critical engagement with him he doesn't understand, so which makes him nervous. Leigh's regular repertory player Lesley Manville makes an engaging contribution as Mary Somerville, a natural philosopher who believes in the magnetic properties of refracted light.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for a movie about an artist is how it is going to look. Cinematographer Dick Pope pulls off some lovely scenes without ever giving his images a misjudged "painterliness". There is a brilliant moment when a landscape detail looks like a painted canvas, but the camera pulls back to reveal it is the real thing. And there is a kind of unselfconscious majesty in the sequence in which Leigh imagines Turner actually witnessing the scene of which he made the subject of his famous painting: he sees The Fighting Temeraire, a veteran Trafalgar gunship being towed up the Thames on the way to being broken up. It makes what Turner stoutly calls a "marine piece". The naval and seafaring traditions of Britain are the wellspring of Turner's imagination, but like Turner and his vision, this tradition, and Victorian Britain are receding into clouds of glory. Every scene in this film is expertly managed; every comic line and funny moment adroitly presented and every performance given with intelligence and love. It is another triumph for Mike Leigh and for Timothy Spall.

More of Peter Bradshaw's reviews from Cannes This confident portrait of the great artists hits its stride straight away, with pin-sharp direction and performances, writes Peter Bradshaw Published: 30 Oct 2014 Kate Kellaway asks the director if his acclaimed film about JMW Turner contains more than a hint of self-portrait Published: 5 Oct 2014 Mike Leigh’s impeccably researched, beautifully filmed but dull film has to join the dots in order to describe the private life of the highly secretive painter, writes Alex von Tunzelmann Published: 6 Nov 2014 The new Woody Allen, the new Mike Leigh, the new David Cronenberg … Plus David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the third Hobbit movie and the final films from Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini Published: 8 Sep 2014 Timothy Spall plays JMW Turner in the new movie Mr Turner, 2014 Timothy Spall plays JMW Turner in the new movie Mr Turner, 2014 29 October 2014 joannaroberts@thekmgroup.co.uk Kent’s most celebrated artistic connection is with JMW Turner, and

 a biopic film released this weekend throws the spotlight on the painter’s love affair with the county.

Jo Roberts reports. The Kent coast was the inspiration for many of painter JMW Turner’s acclaimed works and so, as you would expect, it also features heavily in a new film of the artist’s life. Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner – starring actor Timothy Spall, who has strong Kent connections of his own – is released in cinemas nationwide from Friday, October 31. In focuses on the twilight years of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s life when he was a frequent visitor to a Margate guesthouse to enjoy the coastline’s breath-taking sunsets, which Turner quoted as “the loveliest skies in all Europe”. Turner, who was born in London but lived in Margate on-and-off from the age of about 11, produced more than 30,000 works in his lifetime, more than 100 of which can be traced to his time in Thanet. Having already set the Cannes film festival alight, where it won Timothy the Best Actor gong, the film is expected to be a box office hit in Kent with fans of both the artist Turner and the actor Timothy.

Born in London himself, Timothy also spent time living in Margate, where his mum Sylvia made her home. Timothy became a household name with 1980s TV hit Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and has gone on to appear in films including The King’s Speech, in which he played Winston Churchill, and the Harry Potter series as Peter Pettigrew. Following his Cannes win for Mr Turner in May, the 57-year-old actor paid tribute to mum Sylvia, who lives in Cliftonville, telling journalists: “I said, ‘Your son’s won best actor at Cannes, Mum’. It perked her up. I could tell it cheered her. My mum was a hairdresser and I grew up above Sylvia’s salon in Margate. “You never forget where you come from. Now I’m in Cannes surrounded by all these famous people with an award for best actor.” It is hoped the movie will also bring more tourism into the county, as fans retrace Turner’s steps to Margate.

The town’s Turner Contemporary gallery is urging tourists to book onto the two-day JMW Turner’s Margate Tour, which includes a film showing, a gallery visit, champagne afternoon tea at the Sands Hotel and a stay at the Crescent Victoria Hotel for a limited period. For more information, visit Timothy Spall with his mother Sylvia, who lives in Cliftonville where Timothy is a regular visitor Spotting the local sights Kent film fans will enjoy spotting some familiar sights within the movie, including the impressive HMS Gannet. Turner supposedly had himself lashed to the mast of a boat in order to make sketches for his painting Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, and filmmakers turned to the 136-year-old sloop, moored at Chatham’s Historic Dockyard, to film the scene. The vessel doubles as a pleasure boat on the Thames in the movie. Stangate Creek on the River Medway in Swale was also used for a rowing scene: Stangate Creek was immortalised in a watercolour by Turner circa 1823. Much of the film’s action, including scenes supposedly set in Thanet, was filmed in Cornwall, however.

Shooting in Kent was limited to three days plus two pre and post-production days, and cost an estimated £32,000. Gabrielle Lindemann of Kent Film Office told What’s On: “They looked at various other Kent locations to double both for Margate and London, but most of our coast is too modern now to make a convincing set for the early 19th century which the film covers.” Petworth House: JMW Turner film and art materials on show - BBC News BBC News Petworth House: JMW Turner film and art materials on show 8 January 2015 Close share panel Image copyright PA Image caption A folding travelling watercolour palette is among items owned by JMW Turner on show in the exhibition Painting materials once owned by JMW Turner form part of a new exhibition inspired by Mike Leigh's recent film on the master British landscape artist. Brushes, a folding travelling palette and a pocket paint-book caked with watercolour will be on show at Petworth House in West Sussex from Saturday. Oil and watercolour paintings, along with personal possessions including a ring and gold watch, can also be seen. Four costumes from the film, Mr Turner, also form part of the exhibition.

Image copyright PA Image caption Turner regularly visited Petworth House, painting many of his works at the West Sussex mansion Image copyright PA Image caption A re-creation of a studio used by the artist has been created from props used in the shooting of the film Turner painted many works at the 17th Century mansion house between 1809 and 1837 when he visited as a guest of the 3rd Earl of Egremont. A fishing rod he used at the house's lake and a selection of his books will also be on display. There will also be rarely-seen portraits of the artist, including possibly the last image painted before his death. Image copyright PA Image caption Pieces of art created by actor Timothy Spall during the filming of Mr Turner are on display Actor Timothy Spall played the painter in director Leigh's film, released in October. Paintings he created while training for his role will be on show in a mock-up of Turner's studio created from props used in the film, plus behind-the-scenes footage. Leigh said: "Petworth wrote itself into the film rather than us having to think of possible stately homes.

It is such an extraordinary and rare and rarefied place." Image copyright PA Image caption Andrew Loukes said the exhibition would celebrate the artist's life Andrew Loukes, curator of collections and exhibitions at Petworth House, added: "Turner is an important part of the story at Petworth House. "We are thrilled to be able to mount this celebration of his life." The exhibition runs until 11 March. Image copyright Presser Image caption Timothy Spall spent two years learning how to paint for the role of JMW Turner Mr. Turner (2014) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video An exploration of the last quarter century of the great, if eccentric, British painter J.M.W. Turner's life.

Director: a list of 41 titles created 26 Jun 2013 a list of 31 titles created 19 Feb 2014 a list of 34 titles created 01 Oct 2014 a list of 29 titles created 22 Nov 2014 a list of 41 titles created 16 Nov 2015 Search for " Mr. Turner " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 19 wins & 57 nominations. See more awards » Videos Edit Storyline Mr. Turner explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty. Written by Entertainment One Rated R for some sexual content | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 31 October 2014 (UK) See more » Also Known As: $109,000 (USA) (19 December 2014) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia The movie seemed to have generated a new interest in J.M.W. Turner's works. On December 3, 2014, Turner's painting "Rome, From Mount Aventine" (painted in 1835) was sold at auction by Sotheby's house for 30.3 million pounds (U$ 47.47 million), a record for any pre-20th century British artist. The painting was part of the Rosebery collection ever since 1878 and was in perfect conditions.

See more » Goofs When Dr Price attends Turner in London, he says he is taking the train back to Margate from Charing Cross station, which wasn't opened until 1864, 13 years after Turner's death. See more » Quotes "a United Kingdom/French Republic/Federal Republic of Germany co-production" See more » Connections Pretty Kitty, the maid of the mill from "Harry le Roy, a Heroic Pastoral Burletta" Lyrics by J. Pocock and music by H.R. Bishop (United States) – See all my reviews Mike Leigh's "Mr Turner", a 2 1/2 hour movie had me so fascinated that it flew by. As an enraptured audience member I felt like a fly on the wall to witness Mr. Turner's life and creations of art that were depicted with such extraordinary realism. I felt on a gut level how this man's wonderful art was inspired by his feelings and the world surrounding him. There were so many wonderfully chosen moments and the scenery was so detailed and - thank God- lacking any Hollywood glamour.

The characters were extremely well researched and portrayed to such a degree that I had the feeling I got to live in 1850's England for the 2 1/2 hours. There was not one moment of "acting' in this movie. How refreshing and inspiring! Timothy Spall's portrayal of Mr Turner was amazing in its detail - He inhabited the role 100 %. He embodied the painter to the last brush stroke. Equally wonderful were the women and everybody else in this brilliantly crafted movie. I shall see it again in case I have missed any detail. 119 of 153 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Timothy Spall Takes On Painter J.M.W. Turner, A 'Master Of The Sublime' : NPR Timothy Spall Takes On Painter J.M.W. Turner, A 'Master Of The Sublime' Embed Embed Timothy Spall Takes On Painter J.M.W. Turner, A 'Master Of The Sublime' Timothy Spall Takes On Painter J.M.W. Turner, A 'Master Of The Sublime' Embed Embed Timothy Spall took fine art lessons on and off for two years so he could correctly portray British painter J.M.W.

Turner in Mike Leigh's new film Mr. Turner. Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics hide caption toggle caption Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Timothy Spall took fine art lessons on and off for two years so he could correctly portray British painter J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh's new film Mr. Turner. Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Before he could play British artist J.M.W. Turner, actor Timothy Spall first had to learn how to paint; over the course of two years, Spall took private fine art lessons from London artist Tim Wright. "The goal was to imbue myself in all of the disciplines and all of the different things that Turner would've known," Spall tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. He had no hope of becoming as good as Turner — "that's like being told to become as good as Einstein after you've done Sudoku," he says — but the hard work paid off: Spall has won best actor awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Cannes Film Festival for his role in Mr. Turner.

The film, directed by Mike Leigh, follows Turner from his early 50s to his death in 1851 at the age of 76. The artist's later landscape and seascape paintings are now revered, but were radical for their time. "I suppose you would regard him as one of the greatest landscape painters of all time and a unique artist because he was a master of the sublime," Spall says. "... The sublime ... was something that tried to capture the beauty of nature, as well as its terror and its horror." Article continues after sponsorship Spall has appeared in four other Leigh films, including Topsy Turvy and Secrets and Lies. He also played Winston Churchill in The King's Speech and may be best known to many Americans for his role in the Harry Potter films as Peter Pettigrew.

Interview Highlights On whether Spall wanted to be an artist When I was at school when I was 16 I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army — I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely, or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist. They're not mutually exclusive. Then I did the school play and my drama teacher said after she was taking my nose off (not my actual nose, the nose I had been wearing as the lion in the Wizard of Oz), she said, "I think you should be an actor. It's a terrible job ... but I think you should do it and I'm going to help you and show you the way." Timothy Spall says he had to use a lot of empathy to play a character like Mr. Turner, who wasn't always "very pleasant" and was a "man of massive contradictions." Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics hide caption toggle caption Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Timothy Spall says he had to use a lot of empathy to play a character like Mr.

Turner, who wasn't always "very pleasant" and was a "man of massive contradictions." Simon Mein/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics On how Spall took fine art classes in preparation for the role It was always going to be a tall order, but this brilliant guy, Tim Wright, did take me through all the disciplines and gave me a personal fine art course on and off over two years. And he got me up to such a degree that I was able to paint a full-scale copy of one of his masterpieces — the same size, in oil, on canvas — and the received wisdom is that it's not bad. I've got it on my wall at home and I look at it in the morning and I think, "How the hell did I do that?" Because I certainly couldn't do it again. On whether the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London tried to change his "working class" accent No, thankfully they stopped doing that in the early '60s. When people went there, if you did have a regional accent — whether it be London or Yorkshire or Irish — they tried to inculcate the fact that it was impediment to you.

And they got you to speak what is otherwise called "standard English" or R.P., "received pronunciation," which is the kind of English that grew out of the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] from the 1950s when newsreaders used to wear dinner jackets and dressed to read the news, where everybody sounded exactly the same and no one could be divined as to what part of England they were from. They were just generally regarded as being from the upper echelon of society. On being diagnosed with leukemia in 1996 and his recovery It was a massive odyssey. It was a journey that I had to go through. And I had a growing family; I had young children and a wife. My wife ... now travels with me everywhere — not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall. It was a very tough period ... and some people don't make it. I was one of the lucky ones. I did. Age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.

Because I've been around a long time, but I'm terribly aware that there's so many things I need to know. Timothy Spall On how cancer has influenced his work It doesn't matter as to whether you have to sublimate it or not or whether the character is going through it, because I think your job as an actor, particularly a character actor who doesn't act to make the character fit you — my job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. So you have to use massive amounts of empathy and often you're playing people who aren't very pleasant, as in the case of Mr. Turner, a man of massive contradictions. So you need to be able to go down into your imagination and dig deep to find out what makes people tick. I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition ... I think age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong. Because I've been around a long time, but I'm terribly aware that there's so many things I need to know ... I don't think I've got it right yet. ‘Mr.

Turner’ Review: Mike Leigh’s Masterful Portrait of an Artist | Variety May 15, 2014 | 07:12AM PT Mike Leigh takes on the topsy-turvy life of J.M.W. Turner in an exquisitely detailed, brilliantly acted biopic. English painting’s renowned master of light, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), gets a suitably illuminating screen biography in Mike Leigh ’s “ Mr. Turner ,” an ecstatically beautiful and exquisitely detailed portrait of the artist as a cantankerous middle-aged man whose brilliance with the brush overshadows his sometimes appalling lack of social graces. Returning to the large-canvas period filmmaking of his 1999 Gilbert & Sullivan bio “Topsy-Turvy,” Leigh has made another highly personal study of art, commerce and the glacial progress of establishment tastes, built around a lead performance from longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall that’s as majestic as one of Turner’s own swirling sunsets. A natural awards contender across multiple categories, the pic rolls out Dec. 19 Stateside via Sony Classics following a bevy of further fest appearances.

Leigh has long spoken of wanting to make a Turner film, and his affinity for his subject is palpable in virtually every frame of “Mr. Turner,” which concentrates on roughly the last 25 years in the life of the painter who pushed landscape painting towards the vanguard of impressionism. When the movie opens, it is sometime in the late 1820s (in a welcome departure from the norm, the pic eschews any onscreen titles to mark the passage of time), and Turner, recently returned from a painting expedition in Belgium, is settling back in the home studio he shares with his elderly father (Paul Jesson) and the forlorn housekeeper (an excellent Dorothy Atkinson) who doubles as Turner’s lover. Among the skeletons in the painter’s closet are an estranged mistress (Ruth Sheen), two grown daughters and a grandchild, whom he collectively pays little mind and whose existence he denies to the outside world. The family life is clearly not for Turner. Rather, he goes wherever the wind and the light carry him — specifically, to the southeastern coastal town of Margate, whose azure skies would inspire many of his paintings (including the much-celebrated “The Fighting Temeraire”).

It’s there, traveling under a pseudonym, that he rents a small seaside apartment from the twice-widowed landlady Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey), who will eventually become Turner’s last mistress. And it is this unlikely union, between art-world giant and country simpleton, that also becomes the emotional center of Leigh’s film, with the buoyant, big-hearted Bailey (who played one of the wealthy employers of the abortionist maid in “Vera Drake”) making a superb counterbalance to the feral and ferocious Spall. Unlike “Topsy-Turvy” (which centered on the writing and staging of “The Mikado”), “Mr. Turner” employs a broader, more episodic structure that slowly and steadily immerses us in his world during the period when he was transitioning from classical representational painting to more abstract, proto-impressionistic forms (paintings like the ravishing “Rain, Steam and Speed — The Great Western Railway” and “Wreckers — Coast of Northumberland” in which hazy, indistinct figures weave in and out of radiant swirls of land, sea and sky).

It’s a heady snapshot of a London art scene dominated by the party politics of the Royal Academy of Arts, whose contentious group shows provide the setting for some of “Mr. Turner’”s most memorable moments. As aspirants like the ill-fated biblical painter Benjamin Haydon (Martin Savage) clamor for official acceptance — or to have their canvases displayed in the prestigious main gallery rather than a declasse antechamber — the already famous Turner thinks little of moving in the opposite direction, even as his increasingly avant-garde work becomes a subject of satirical parody and stinging bourgeois rebukes. And though Turner has at least one influential critic on his side in the young and impetuous John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire), it isn’t clear that he appreciates having him there. When Turner admonishes Ruskin for praising his work at the expense of more conventional artists, the scene feels like a direct memo from Leigh to those who chronicle his own career. In perhaps the greatest of all movies about the lives of painters, Maurice Pialat’s “Van Gogh,” not a single Van Gogh painting was ever shown. Leigh doesn’t go quite as far in “Mr.

Turner,” but his sensibility is largely the same, striving to capture the temperament of the man and his times rather than reducing them to a series of iconic images and eureka moments. Scenes of Turner scribbling in his sketchbook and slathering paint on canvas are used sparingly, and never without a clear purpose. Shooting in widescreen, the director and his regular d.p. Dick Pope strive less to re-create Turner’s canvases cinematically than to capture something of the land and light as it might have inspired him: a steam locomotive cloaking the horizon in its exhaust; boats at sea wreathed in a magic-hour glow. Whereas Leigh’s much-vaunted work with actors has often dominated the discussion around his films, “Mr. Turner” should leave no lingering doubts that he is every bit as masterful a visual storyteller. Despite the fact-based characters, “Mr. Turner” was developed through the same improvisational workshop process as all of Leigh’s films, and the results have same acutely researched and lived-in feel. That’s especially true of Spall, who so fully internalizes Turner that he doesn’t seem to be playing the part as much as channeling it.

With his great squashed-in face, Spall shows you every flicker of thought that flashes across Turner’s mind, and every wince of pain that courses through his wearying body. He conveys the sense of a man driven by a talent and passion even he doesn’t fully understand — a raging, difficult, gruntingly inarticulate soul who finds in pictures the clarity of expression that otherwise elude him. And in the film’s final moment, as Turner lays hovering between life and death, Spall discovers a particular pathos in the dilemma of a man in love with light confronted by the fading of his own. The topnotch tech credits extend to production designer Suzie Davies and costume designer Jacqueline Durran, who make their own invaluable contributions to bringing the film’s 19th-century world so vividly to life. Composer Gary Yershon’s original score alternates an atonal woodwind theme with sharp, staccato strings to create something like the musical equivalent of Turner’s restless, roiling spirit. Cannes Film Review: 'Mr. Turner' Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 15, 2014. Running time: 149 MIN.

Production (U.K.-France-Germany) A Sony Pictures Classics (in U.S.)/Entertainment One (in U.K.)/Diaphana (in France) release of a Film4/Focus Features Intl./BFI presentation of a Xofa Prods. production in co-production with Diaphana, France 3 Cinema and Amusement Park Films, with the participation of Canal Plus, Cine Plus and France Televisions, in association with LipSync Prods. (International sales: Sunray Films, London.) Produced by Georgina Lowe. Executive producers, Tessa Ross, Norman Merry, Gail Egan. Co-producers, Michel Saint-Jean, Malte Grunert. Crew Directed, written by Mike Leigh.

Camera (color, widescreen), Dick Pope; editor, Jon Gregory; music, Gary Yershon; production designer, Suzie Davies; art director, Dan Taylor; set decorator, Charlotte Watts; costume designer, Jacqueline Durran; sound (Dolby Digital), Tim Fraser; sound designer, Robert Ireland; supervising sound editor, Lee Herrick; re-recording mixer, Robert Farr; visual effects supervisor, George Zwier; visual effects producer, Paul Driver; visual effects, LipSync Post; assistant director, Josh Robertson; casting, Nina Gold. With Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Lesley Manville, Martin Savage, Joshua McGuire, Ruth Sheen, David Horovitch, Karl Johnson. (English dialogue) The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leigh’s film got its man? | Film | The Guardian Mr Turner The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leigh’s film got its man? Timothy Spall plays the painter as a rough diamond, a blast of the roistering 18th century in the moralising Victorian era Timothy Spall as the painter JMW Turner and Marion Bailey as his landlady Sophia Booth in Mike Leigh's film Mr Turner.

Photograph: Allstar/FILM4/Sportsphoto Ltd Friday 31 October 2014 15.44 EDT Last modified on Friday 31 October 2014 20.01 EDT Share on Messenger Close Timothy Spall’s Turner is a strange, magnificent being. He gurns, he growls, he mumbles and grumbles. It is impossible not to be fascinated and moved by him. His onscreen death made me cry. But how much does this great plum pie of a man churning his way through a 19th-century England resemble the actual JMW Turner , who was born in 1775 and died in 1851? The real Turner was a lot more handsome and elegant, at least in his own eyes. Spall’s Turner admits that “when I look in the mirror, I see a gargoyle”. Real Turner, when he was about 24 years old – much younger than when we meet him in the film – gazed in the mirror and saw a handsome, debonair, fiercely perceptive youth, his wide open eyes looking straight ahead, seeing everything. It is those eyes that contain the true Turner.

It is in their fiery vision of nature, myth and history that all his secrets can be found. Pinterest Detail from Joseph Mallord William Turner’s self portrait at 24, showing the intensity of his gaze. Photograph: Alamy Turner lives in his paintings. You only have to stroll through Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery, which displays works from the copious bequest of his own work that Turner left the nation, or visit the same museum’s Late Turner exhibition, to realise that most of the painter’s time, energy and emotion must have gone into producing sketches, watercolours and oil paintings. The sex life and affairs whose enigmas drive the film did not matter to him except as light relief from all that exhausting work. In short, the real Turner was not as cuddly as Leigh makes him. He was a driven artist. He wanted to compete not just with contemporaries such as John Constable – who in the film looks appropriately downtrodden by Turner’s remorseless artistic strength – but Poussin, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. He did it – he painted himself into the pantheon of the greatest artists of all time. There is no evidence that he cared who he hurt to get there.

Spall’s Turner is a rough diamond. Really rough. We see him spurn a former mistress and refuse to acknowledge paternity of their children; completely true. We also see him drawing a prostitute in a brothel – again, true to what is known about him. But the greatness of Spall’s acting lies in humanising a man who at times seems so brutal and cold. When he thinks about the daughter whose funeral he didn’t attend, he weeps. When he makes the prostitute pose, he also weeps. Is it guilt? Pinterest Timothy Spall in a scene from Mr Turner by director Mike Leigh. Photograph: Allstar/FILM4/Sportsphoto Ltd Leigh and Spall are just as blind as the moralising Victorians were to what is likely to have been Turner’s real attitude to love, sex and family responsibilities: he probably never felt a shred of anxiety about any of it. Where he came from, loving and leaving was natural. For he came from the 18th century. Turner was the victim of a culture clash. He grew up and became an artist in the freewheeling Georgian age, when London was full of Hogarthian rakes and Moll Flanders types on the make.

Even coffee houses frequently doubled as brothels. Don’t even ask about the bathhouses. As the Cambridge historian Vic Gatrell, whose recent book The First Bohemians delves into the artistic and sexual scene of 18th-century Covent Garden, told me: “I don’t think he’s self-conscious about his libertine ways.” Eighteenth-century libertinism was simply the culture that shaped young Turner. He was born in Maiden Lane, close by Covent Garden, then the heart of London’s gambling, drinking and commercial sex district. His father was a barber, his mother was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, and ended up in the notorious Bedlam hospital. It was, says Gatrell, a bohemian world. This London of loose morals was remote from the same city in which he died in 1851. In the course of his lifetime, British manners were transformed. The freedoms of the Georgian age had become constrained by starched collars and cast-iron respectability. Turner’s great critical champion, John Ruskin, was one of the most Victorian of Victorians, and when he went through Turner’s artistic bequest at the National Gallery, he felt ill.

He found not just the landscapes he loved, but sketches “of the most shameful sort – the pudenda of women – utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable”. Ruskin revealed that he burned most of Turner’s erotic art, for the good of his hero’s reputation and the national soul. Strangely enough, he seems to have been lying. Tate Britain has now located enough of Turner’s sexy watercolours to establish that Ruskin never did burn them – or if he did destroy some, there must really have been a lot. This was the second shock Ruskin and other Victorian Turner fans had suffered. The first was when he died in the secret Chelsea home he shared with his last lover, Mrs Booth, a Margate landlady. Leigh is on firmer ground in making this relationship touching and warm – they were both old enough and their life together lasted long enough for it to have been emotional, not just a libertine’s last fling. Pinterest Apollo and Python (1811) by JMW Turner. Photograph: Tate In Turner’s painting Apollo and Python in Tate Britain, the ancient Greek god Apollo has just slain a horrific serpentine monster. Turner surrounds Apollo with golden light.

He is the embodiment of reason and – literally – enlightenment. The monster Python lies tangled in the branches of devastated trees, its viscera spewing out. Its jaws are almost invisible in the darkness that envelops this part of the picture. Looking into that gloom, you start to notice something disturbing. There are other monsters in the dark. A glittering eye, a gruesome set of fangs glisten in the shadows. Python is dead, but unreason lives on. More monsters are creeping forward to threaten all that is good. Is this painting autobiographical? It might be an exploration of the artist’s own dark side. He may be thinking of his mother’s madness. Was he scared of going mad himself? Yet any such personal feelings are translated by Turner to the lofty level of history painting. His art aspires all the time to say things not about him, but about the human condition. Apollo and Python is one of the greatest of all paintings of a Greek myth because it so deeply and resonantly reveals the poetry and philosophy of the ancient legend – that it is a story about reason, unreason and the nature of civilisation. The inarticulacy of Spall’s Turner is true to life.

He was mocked for it – and again it comes from his unvarnished London childhood. He came “out of the people, out of the plebs”, says Gatrell. But there’s always going to be something missing from our understanding of Turner if we only listen to his sometimes stumbling words. His paintings, truly, are where the real Mr Turner can be found. In them he does not stumble. He never has – Ruskin was right to insist – a mean or ignoble thought. Apollo and Python is unutterably profound. It is in his works of unparalleled insight and nuance that we encounter the real Mr Turner – the genius.

Question: Who plays the part of JMW Turner in the 2014 film 'Mr Turner'?
Answer: Timothy Spall